Scarcity in the Digital Realm

The Digital Gold Institute
is an R&D center of excellence
about scarcity in the digital domain (Bitcoin and crypto assets)
and the underlying blockchain technology.
Focused on our
partnership
and training programs,
we are engaged in the
scientific
and academic debate,
where the cypherpunk movement meets
the Austrian school of economics.
Cryptography, monetary theory,
computer networking, and game theory:
we explore the cornerstones
and can assist in understanding them.
Of course, we write
code and love to get our hands dirty in programming
and technology.

Vision

Bitcoin: Digital Gold

The most successful attempt at creating
scarcity in the digital realm
without a trusted third party,
Bitcoin is a bearer asset that can be
transferred over computer networks but not duplicated.
Accessible to anyone,
it is intrinsic to a peculiar uncensorable
distributed settlement ledger,
updated with cryptographic techniques
and secured by large amounts of energy
in the form of computational work.
Bitcoin is the digital equivalent of gold,
disruptive for our current digital civilization
and the future of money and finance.
More a crypto-commodity then a crypto-currency,
Bitcoin aims to be world reserve asset.

Blockchain: Hype or Reality?

Blockchain is an append-only sequential data structure:
to change a block in the middle of the chain all
subsequent blocks need to be changed.
Very inefficient if compared to a
relational database, it is mostly an idiosyncratic
technology for digital scarcity.
Indeed, blockchain requires an
intrinsic native digital asset
to provide the economic incentives for the
blockchain maintainers to be honest.
Without the seigniorage revenues associated to its
native asset, a blockchain system would need to select
and appoint its maintainers,
ultimately resorting to central governance.

Beyond Bitcoin: Timestamping

A timestamp demonstrates that a document existed in a
specific status prior to a given point in time.
Digital data can be securely timestamped though the
attestation of its hash value
in a blockchain transaction.
OpenTimestamps
is a vendor-independent open protocol that defines a
set of operations for creating
provable blockchain
timestamps and later independently verifying them;
as such, it allows for third party auditability and
is suitable for regulatory prescriptions.
What jewelry is for gold, timestamping could be for Bitcoin:
not essential but effective at leveraging its beauty.

Financial Services for Crypto

Finance does not really need blockchain,
but the blockchain economy does need
new financial services.
The most promising blockchain field is
the development of financial services
for crypto assets:
those products, indexes, tools, practices, and facilities
(primarily custody)
needed by institutional investors
and high-net-worth individuals.
Moreover, the frontier is the
monetary engineering
made possible by using bitcoin as reserve asset:
Hayek Money,
the paradigme of new stable private monies
competing with the legal tender ones
and Central Bank Digital Currencies.

Vision Makes A Difference

Services

Becoming one of our
partners
means empowering your business with
a proper understanding of Bitcoin, crypto assets, and
blockchain technology.
It is a strategic choice that will allow you to
leverage unique opportunities
while avoiding the irrational hype
that pollutes these topics.
Our partnership program is
aimed at
consulting firms,
financial institutions,
insurance companies,
innovative enterprises,
software houses,
corporates,
lobbying groups,
and regulators.
We offer you a continuous support
in term of
consulting, training, research, and development:
we can help starting-up from early stage
until you reach full autonomy,
also cooperating with the academic world
interested in the issues
of our competence area.

We offer training and education about Bitcoin,
crypto assets, blockchain, distributed ledger,
smart contracts, and cryptography:
the program is based on the
Bitcoin and Blockchain
Technology course
taught at Milano-Bicocca and other universities.
The content can be
customized depending on requirements:
for corporate or academic settings,
public or private events,
as a short talk, a single day workshop,
or a structured learning program over few days.
The training can be offered directly by us or through our
Educational Program Partners,
realized on-site at your premises or at our own locations.

Research

Our research activity includes
quarterly reports
on the bitcoin and blockchain ecosystem
(in Italian, exclusive to our
partners)
and the thesis works of our
students.
Anyway, the bulk of the activity
is happening at the
Crypto Asset Lab
(CAL),
a joint research initiative with the University of Milano-Bicocca.
The lab is focused on
crypto assets as investment opportunity, fintech innovation, and regulatory challenge,
with special regard for their disruptive role in the future of money and finance.
A meeting point between academia, industry, institutions, and regulators,
CAL also promotes a
yearly conference.

Development

We write code
and love to get our hands dirty in programming
and technology.
Check out our
OpenTimestamps calendar
free facility
and
btclib,
an open-source Python library
intended for teaching/learning/using bitcoin,
its blockchain,
and the associated elliptic curve cryptography.

Eric Ehlers

Technical Officer

Cofounder and director of Reposit Limited, providing consulting services in the domain of quantitative finance.QuanLibXL project founder. Formerly 12 years at J.P. Morgan Chase, first in IT management and later as technical lead for front-office pricing spreadsheets.